Even in the midst of rehearsing for Tainted, an upcoming play about the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s, it’s not unusual for 13-year-old actor Owen Mason to phone his father to pepper him with questions.

How exactly does someone with hemophilia mix the blood-clotting medicine Factor VIII? How many seconds does it take to push the plunger in on the syringe? Is it painful? What are the side effects?

Those details will make the scenes “as realistic as possible,” says Mason, who plays a 12-year-old with the bleeding disorder. The character becomes infected with HIV and hepatitis after using contaminated Factor VIII.

And who better to ask than his father, Andrew Cumming, one of the 30,000 Canadians infected with HIV and/or hepatitis after receiving transfusions of improperly tested blood and plasma drugs.

“He’s my Google,” says the teen, who uses Mason as a stage name. “I have yet to go onto the Internet. . . . I get it all from my dad.”

What he gets from his dad is the grim reality of what it was like to live through the country’s worst public health disaster, one that decimated the hemophiliac community in the 1980s when HIV/AIDS first surfaced. Thousands of Canadians died from tainted blood — some of which originated from paid donors in prisons and skid row. Many infections could have been prevented if the Canadian Red Cross had acted sooner to screen donors and test blood.

“It wiped out an entire class of severe hemophiliacs,” says Cumming, 54, who became infected with HIV and hepatitis C from tainted blood in Factor VIII.

All the people he knew in his age group who, like him, were severe hemophiliacs have since died. “I’m the last guy,” says Cumming, calling what happened “a holocaust.”

“It’s a piece of our history that seems to have been forgotten, a scant 25 years after it happened and we all need to be reminded of it.”

Wanting to remind people, to have audience members “witness” what transpired, prompted Kat Lanteigne to write Tainted, which runs Sept. 26 to Oct. 12 at Toronto’s Aki Studio Theatre.

“If we don’t witness it, then it can happen again, and history can repeat itself very easily,” says Lanteigne.

The Toronto actress and writer was inspired after seeing the tainted blood’s devastating impact on an extended family member, who became infected with HIV. She spent years researching the issue and interviewed more than 50 people, including survivors such as Cumming and family members of those affected. People shared their struggles of trying to keep their family together, feeling betrayed by the government and the shock of learning they were infected with HIV, making them targets of discrimination and stigma.

Tainted, directed by Vikki Anderson, is the story of a family with three hemophiliac sons who become infected with HIV and hepatitis C from Factor VIII. Although the family is a fictional one, the characters are composites of the various individuals Lanteigne interviewed and reflect a common experience.

Cumming, who was in the audience during a first-reading of the play, says he was moved to tears — for the first time.

“Tears were streaming down my face,” he recalls. “I just knew it was a great script when it had that effect on me. It was authentic. It brought me back to a place. It made me cry about things I never ever cried about. . . . I’ve just always stoically dealt with it.”

Lanteigne says this is the first play she’s aware of that tackles the issue of the tainted blood crisis. Unable to secure any government grants for the play, she raised $50,000 on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo to put on the production.

Although Tainted was never meant to be a political statement, Lanteigne has become a “reluctant activist” since news surfaced in February of private clinics wanting to open in Ontario. She will be inviting all federal MPs and Ontario MPPs to attend Tainted.

“It’s time for them, for the first time in history, to stand up for Canadians and for our domestic blood system,” she says. “What people forget is the impact it had on Canadian families and they need to be reminded. . . . This absolutely devastated people from Whitehorse to St. John’s.”

Tainted runs Sept. 26 to Oct. 12 at the Aki Studio Theatre, 585 Dundas St. E. in Toronto. Tickets are $27 to $42. For details visit gromkat.com or call 1-800-204-0855. On Oct. 4 — the 20th anniversary of Krever’s appointment to the inquiry — and Oct. 5, there will be a post-performance discussion panel. It will include epidemiologist Dr. Don Francis, who worked at the US Centers for Disease Control in the early 1980s and who issued early warnings about the spread of HIV/AIDS through the blood supply.

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